Pregunta 1
Passage II — Social Science: two passages about teaching handwriting (original texts)
Passage A
For most of the history of schooling, no one needed to defend handwriting. It was simply how writing happened. Now that most adult writing is done on keyboards and screens, handwriting instruction has quietly shrunk in many elementary schools, sometimes to a few weeks in first grade. I think this is a mistake, and not for sentimental reasons.
The strongest case for handwriting has to do with learning to read. When young children form a letter by hand, they must attend to its parts—the closed loop of a b, the direction its stem faces—in a way that pressing a key does not require. Several studies have found that children who practice letters by hand later recognize them more quickly and accurately than children who practice the same letters by typing. A letter, for a beginning reader, is a shape that must be learned, and the hand seems to be one of the ways the shape gets learned. Teachers of young children often describe the same thing in plainer terms: a child who has written a letter many times tends to remember which way it faces, while a child who has only tapped it on a screen is more likely to confuse it with its mirror image.
The benefits may continue past the early grades. In one widely cited set of experiments, college students who took lecture notes on laptops tended to copy the speaker’s words nearly word for word, while students writing by hand, who could not keep up, were forced to summarize. On later tests of understanding, the hand-writers did better. Writing slowly, it seems, can be an advantage: it forces the writer to decide what matters.
None of this means that children should not learn to type. They should. But typing and handwriting are not interchangeable skills, and treating one as the replacement for the other confuses the speed of a tool with its effect on the person using it. A school that drops handwriting saves some minutes in the schedule. It may be spending something harder to see.
I would add one practical point. Children who write slowly and with effort tend to write less, and to write less well, because the work of forming letters crowds out the work of thinking. The answer is not to abandon handwriting but to teach it well enough that it becomes automatic—and that takes regular practice over several years, not a few weeks.
Passage B
Debates about handwriting tend to turn quickly into debates about cursive, and debates about cursive tend to turn into debates about tradition. I would like to set tradition aside and ask a narrower question: given a limited number of hours in the school day, which writing skills will students actually use?
Some handwriting, clearly. Young children need to form letters fluently enough that writing does not exhaust them, and there is good evidence that a child who struggles to form letters also struggles to compose sentences; the effort spent on one is unavailable for the other. So I have no quarrel with teaching legible print until it is automatic. The question is what happens after that.
In many schools, the answer has been years of cursive practice—a second alphabet, joined in particular ways, taught to a standard of neatness that few adults ever use again. Meanwhile, students arrive in middle school typing with two fingers. They will write nearly everything on keyboards for the rest of their lives, often under time pressure, yet keyboarding is commonly left for them to pick up on their own. That seems backward to me. A student who types twenty words a minute is not only slow; like the child who struggles to form letters, that student spends on the mechanics of writing attention that should be going into the ideas.
Defenders of handwriting often cite research showing that students who take notes by hand understand lectures better than students who type. The finding is appealing, but later attempts to repeat those experiments have produced mixed results, and some found no meaningful difference. What does seem to matter is whether students summarize rather than transcribe—a habit that can be taught on a keyboard as well as in a notebook.
The goal of writing instruction is not beautiful letters or fast typing. It is clear thinking on the page. Every hour spent perfecting a skill that students will rarely use is an hour not spent on that goal. We should teach children to write by hand well enough that their hands do not get in the way of their thoughts, and then we should teach them to type well enough that the keyboard does not get in the way either.
Both authors would most likely agree that:
- A. young children should learn to form letters by hand fluently.
- B. schools should spend several years teaching cursive to every student.
- C. research has proved that handwritten notes lead to better learning.
- D. typing should not be taught until students reach high school.
Ver respuesta y explicación
Respuesta correcta: A. young children should learn to form letters by hand fluently.
Explicación
Passage A wants handwriting taught “well enough that it becomes automatic,” and Passage B has “no quarrel with teaching legible print until it is automatic.” Both accept fluent early handwriting.
Passage B opposes years of cursive and doubts the note-taking research. Passage A says children should learn to type, and B wants more keyboarding, not less.